By News and Communications Staff

January 01, 2024

 

Viola Ardeni (World Languages and Literatures) published the essay "Feeling Blue: Addressing Gender Violence in Italian Illustrated Fairy Tales" in the edited volume E la regina morì, Ricordando Angela Articoni (And the Queen Died: In Memory of Angela Articoni, 2024). The essay discusses fairy tale narratives in contemporary Italy that recast Charles Perrault’s La Barbe Bleue (Bluebeard, 1697) in illustrated editions for children and young adults. Is there a resistance in these texts against the serial-power dynamics that belong to the Bluebeard fairy tale? How does the concurrence of word and image affect the representation? Do the stories create sites for active readership and contestation of gender violence within the couple and the family or represent conflict just as an internal struggle for the heroine? The essay argues that illustrated books address the gender and sexual violence inherent to the centuries-old fairy tale by shaping such violence in a pleasing fashion to their readership. These publications also shift alterity from the outer presence of the husband to an inner feeling embodied by the female characters. They do so by accentuating the aesthetics of visual representation and relying on the fairy tale’s cultural memory in the West.

Tyler M. Argüello (Social Work) has a new publication on the spatialization of HIV via social marketing. This article is concerned with how HIV is spatialized, or emplaced in everyday life, and therefore how prevention, queer identity, and the virus itself are given meaning.

Mikkel Herholdt Jensen (Physics and Astronomy) is the co-principal investigator on a new National Science Foundation, Division of Materials Research (NSF:DMR) grant. The project is a collaboration with the Parikh lab at UC Davis. The NSF grant (Award #2342436) is entitled “Crowding and Confinement: Coupling of Bulk and Membrane Phase Separation in Giant Vesicles,” and aims to develop model systems to characterize the thermodynamics of dynamic processes in cell model systems. Using simplified models of cell, which minimally mimic the size and the environments of the living cell, the research project will focus on how molecular distributions in a cell-like environment gets organized and how it affects the very boundary and the shape of the minimal cell itself. The proposal will be funded for $600,000 over 3 years starting in the fall of 2024, and will involve Sac State students for the duration of the project.

Jamie Kneitel and Tim Davidson (Biological Sciences) along with Sac State alumnus Sean O’Brien published the article "Invertebrate community composition differs between restored and natural vernal pools" in Restoration Ecology. The study evaluated 180 natural and restored vernal pools from San Diego to southern Oregon to determine their similarity with regard to aquatic invertebrates, including threatened and endangered species.

Jamie Kneitel (Biological Sciences), with international collaborators, published the article, “A global assessment of environmental and climatic controls on wetland macroinvertebrate structure and function” in Global Change Biology. They evaluated a global wetland dataset to understand how wetland ecosystems and their species will respond to climate change.

Ruby Mendoza (English) received a 2024 Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship from The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in association with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) for their dissertation, "A Rhetorical, Decolonial, and Cultural Critique of Cistematic Academic Scholarly Practices: Mobilizing Queer and Trans* Formative BIPOC Resistance for Institutional Critique." The award is given each year to four works - one book, one article or book chapter, one dissertation, and one nontraditional scholarly text - published within the last two years that best make queer interventions into the study of composition and rhetoric. Mendoza will be honored at the CCCC Awards presentation on April 5, during the organization's annual convention in Spokane, Washington.

Hakan Ozcekik (Management) will participate in the Academy of Management Scholars quarterly panel ay 7:30 a.m. March 19 via Zoom. Recent Gallup report has found that workers are unhappier at work than they have been in years, noting they are angry, stressed and disengaged. This panel will explore this troubling trend to provide research-based actionable insights and solutions. The panel also includes Dr. Bonnie Hayden Cheng from Hong Kong University, Dr. Christian Busch from University of Southern California, and Dr. Simone Phipps from Middle Georgia State University.

Katie Savin (Social Work) received a grant from the Social Security Administration’s Retirement and Disability Research Consortium at the University of Wisconsin, Madison to further their qualitative research on the experience of receiving SSI benefits for Californians. This study "A Qualitative Investigation of Work-Related Decision Making Among SSI Recipients," will be conducted across Sacramento and Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. The Pittsburg site is led by Savin's co-PI, Nev Jones. Preliminary findings from this study have been selected for presentation at a conference for SSA policymakers in Washington, D.C. this August.

Savin also published an article with a few co-authors in the Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation called “Every day you are working you have to prove it:" Navigating the costs of work and ableism with visual impairment. This qualitative study analyzes the economic impact of vision loss on individuals and how these costs interacted with perceived ableism in the labor market to create a climate of job scarcity and anxiety, which came at additional cost to participants who felt stuck in low-paying work.

Ajay S. Singh (Environmental Studies) received funding through the state's $80 million Climate Change Initiative administered through the UC Chancellors Office. The Collaboratory for Equity in Water Allocations (COEQWAL) project brings together expertise from across the UC system, Sacramento State, government agencies, and NGO organizations to advance access to information about California's water future under a changing climate. The project leverages new climate change projections to explore tradeoffs in water availability outcomes across a range of management scenarios, with an emphasis on providing meaningful, timely, and actionable information on vulnerabilities for communities with historically limited involvement in water resources planning. The project will use a participatory co-design process with disadvantaged communities, environmental organizations, tribes, agricultural groups, municipalities, and water management agencies.

Dr. Pamela Wimbush and Tammy Champion (College of Continuing Education) attended the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA) Marketing, Enrollment Management, and Student Success (MEMS) Conference in Portland, Ore. While there, Dr. Wimbush and Champion co-presented on the topic "We Can Go It Alone, but We Are Stronger Together: Merging Enrollment and Marketing Services." Champion also accepted an "Excellence in Marketing" award on behalf of CCE’s Enrollment and Marketing team during the MEMS conference.

Additionally, Wimbush, who is interim dean of CCE, will serve as a diversity and inclusive excellence committee co-chair for a two-year term (2024-2026) for UPCEA. The appointment came as part of the online and professional education association's election of new officers and new directors to serve on its board. Elected in November, these individuals will assume their roles on March 28, 2024. Dr. Wimbush has made a significant impact on institutions as a distinguished scholar, researcher, and educator in continuing, professional, and online education. She is dedicated to expanding access and social mobility through quality learning.

Dr. Jian-Zhong “Joe” Zhou (University Library) is an article co-author with a Chinese university post-doc: “The Analysis of Innovative GE at UC Berkeley - GE 4.0 and DeCal courses taught by Berkeley undergraduates.” Higher Education Development and Evaluation 2023, v.38; No.182(04) 73-81+122. This is partially based on Zhou’s summer visiting scholar’s work to China.

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